As the prairies of Western Iowa had thus become a vast white table land, whose ground was hidden from view, I crossed the Missouri as soon as possible and proceeded to the interior of Nebraska where the storm had not taken place and the surface of the land was still in its autumnal condition. I stopped at various places in the valley of the river Platte and, at one of the newly formed settlements, obtained convenient quarters in the house of a man who had passed the greatest part of his life with the Pawnees, a tribe of Indians who have always been considered to hold an exceptional position with respect to their religious observances and language.
He had lived in the tents and was well acquainted with their habits of life, and like all other men whom I had met who had been much in contact with the Indians, occupying the country west of the Mississippi, he had been impressed by the reality of their personal faith in supernatural manifestations of power for good or evil.
I was much interested in ascertaining the existence of certain facts which seemed to show analogies between these Pawnees and the race who under the name of Toltecs or Aztecs had migrated from some unknown country into Mexico. It has not hitherto been explained how it happened that this tribe who, as far as is known, have always lived in this region, placed in the centre of the continent, should possess a language which is absolutely different from that of any other race of North American Indians, and that they should have been, for a long period of time, surrounded by powerful tribes with whom they could never have held any spoken communications. Mr. Albert Gallatin, a learned American ethnologist, draws attention to their singularly isolated position. He states that “they speak a language altogether different from that of the Sioux tribes or of any other Indians known to us.”[37]
They do not appear to have been a numerous race, for, when their territories were first explored, it was estimated that, including men, women and children, their numbers were under seven thousand. At the time that I passed through the ancient hunting grounds in Nebraska, their descendants (of whom there were said to be about three thousand) were gathered together in a reservation north of the Platte. I saw a few of them near the banks of that river, and some others who had committed a series of ferocious acts on the plains and had carried off several scalps. They were captured, imprisoned and condemned to death. These men were wild-looking savages who stalked restlessly round the cells in which they were confined like intractable and untameable animals. Those I saw wandering near the Platte had, for some unknown reason, dressed themselves in war paint. Their eyes were encircled by broad bands of red ochre. Their faces were covered with blue stripes which in their outlines resembled the tattoed lines of the Maoris in New Zealand.
The natural colour of the Pawnees I met was rather darker than the skins of the Sioux and Chippewas. The men were of more than the ordinary stature and were powerfully built. Their heads were broad and massive and all of them had remarkably high cheek bones.
The early explorers, sent by the Government towards the West, did not learn much about the superstitions of the native tribes, but it is mentioned in the Report of the Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1819–20 that the Pawnees, then living near the forks of the river Loup in the valley of the Platte, had originally a custom, which was believed to be annual but was no longer followed, of offering a human sacrifice to the Great Star.
The victim was always a prisoner that had been captured in war.
Mr. James, one of the members of the exploring party, stated that the star to which the sacrifice was made, was the planet Venus. It is probable therefore that this ceremony had some connection with the worship of the sun, as the Indians, who were accurate observers of all natural events, would have noticed that Venus, both as a morning and evening star, appeared to govern the movements of the greater light, and either announced its approach at dawn or followed its departure at sunset.
The Pawnees and the Dakotas are the only North American tribes known to have had the custom of killing human beings, for the purpose of presenting them to their gods as propitiations in time of distress, or as thanksgiving offerings after successful wars. The sacrifices made to their gods of war by the Aztecs were probably introduced into Mexico by that fierce race. The last human sacrifice offered by the Pawnees occurred in the year 1837, and in this case it is believed that the offering was made to the spirit who caused the land to produce fertile crops.
A young girl of fourteen years of age had been captured during a war with the Sioux, and it was decided that she was to be killed and sacrificed to this particular Manito. The strange character of the method of immolation arrests attention. The girl was carefully secured upon a framework made of light poles, raised a few feet above the ground. When she was in the right position for the sacrifice, a fire was kindled beneath, but before the flames had actually begun to touch her, and precisely at the moment when it was perceived that the fire was sufficiently strong to begin to burn her, she was suddenly killed by a flight of arrows.[38] She was then taken down from the scaffolding and the flesh was cut into small portions and taken away into the fields, where the blood was sprinkled over certain parts of the land which had been planted.